More on sleep

8 pm. I could not believe I was in bed that early. Our little girls were still bouncing off the wall in their bedroom, but at least I was making the effort. I was impressed by the statistics of what chronic deprivation can do to your judgement and motor skills. I have a carotid artery endarterectomy to do this morning so I decided to pull out all the stops and get the best night of sleep I possibly could.

Just for the heck of it, I downloaded the app Sleep Cycles. It is pretty clever…it uses the iPhone’s microphone to detect what stage of sleep you are in, map it throughout the night, and wake you during a stage of very light sleep. I reviewed my graph from the night before and was gratified to see that I had gotten a solid six hours of sleep with several periods of deep sleep. Not too bad.

I have been focusing on improving sleep for the past week or so. In general I feel maybe a little better but I haven’t seen a huge notable improvement yet. I am waiting for a reply from my colleague in sleep medicine about possible sleep apnea. I suspect that apnea may be a big explanation. We will see.

The above text conversation exemplifies a big issue for me. This is the other thing I want to talk about. It is difficult, brutally so sometimes, to separate your self-worth from your mental image of your body. When there is a problem, it is far less painful to deny it than it is to face it and fix it. But that mentality will paralyze you. If CPAP is what it takes for me to reach physical fitness, so be it.